[MonoDevelop] Suggestion: plug autocomplete into fsi

[fsharp]

[MonoDevelop] Suggestion: plug autocomplete into fsi

[7sharp9]

@rneatherway Is there a way your recent emacs changes could lead to work in this area?

[rneatherway]

To be honest this seems difficult. FSI compiles assemblies on the fly, which isn't really a good fit for the compiler bindings. It expects either a project with assemblies on disk or a script file (a better fit) with #load and #r directives.

[7sharp9]

How about autocomplete for just the core libraries, a reflective autocomplete for the on the fly stuff could come later.

The problem with the reflective one would be determining the latest version of a particular type that had been created as all types are kept loaded in memory I think.

[rneatherway]

Core libraries would be fine I think, just present a bare script environment. It would also be fairly easy to add any libraries that were included with #r.

I imagined for a more fully-fledged version that one hacky approach would be to compile the intermediate assemblies and keep them on disk to pass to the compiler service. Really I think the best would be to extend FSI itself.

[tpetricek]

There might be an easier way to get some basic IntelliSense in F# Interactive.

The compiler source code apparently already contains some code to do this - for example the FSharpInteractiveServer type in fsiserver.fs has methods Completions and GetDeclarations, which should give us some IntelliSense - but these are inside #if FSI_SERVER_INTELLISENSE, so the question is whether standard F# binaries contain them. If so, that might be a way to go...

(MonoDevelop binding has a reference to FSharpInteractiveServer here inside InteractiveSession.fs)

[rneatherway]

That's great news! Any idea why Visual Studio doesn't make use of this?

[7sharp9]

@tpetricek Wouldn't the problem be that in fsi theres no real document to parse to pass the line data to the compiler?

[tpetricek]

@rneatherway It is probably untested implementation - one of many experiments that the F# team did while working on Visual Studio integration (a bit like my regions & navigation bars, but this one cannot be turned on...)

@7sharp9 I think it does not need the usual line data, because it directly uses the state that F# Interactive keeps around. See fsi.fs.